The New York Times website has basically been overrun with the MSN 8 ads. Not only do they stick HUGE ads in the middles of their copy (bigger than the other annoying ads in those pages), but they have those ones that hijack your browser window over the story you want to read.

They apparently also hired some poor shmoes to dress up as the Tick, er, I mean the butterfly and rollerblade all over Manhattan screaming like Monkey-boy Ballmer.

Does effective advertising have to be cheesy and annoying? Apparently so...

It makes me wonder. They know they are microsoft and are not going to get into much trouble. Think about the free advertising that is comming from all these mistakes... They play them on the news everytime it happens...

True, I get sick of the "who did what first" arguments in Mac/PC fora, but IBM certainly did a better job, and so did the creators of the Tick. (I know what it is -- the antennae are from the Tick, the wings are Arthur's and the guy who play the butterfly in the MS commercials has a similar demeanor as the live-action Tick on TV.) I guess it's that it comes off as so disingenuous, as is every MS attempt at cheerleading. Remember the Windows 2000 premiere? The WinXP one? The Steve Ballmer Nuremburg-esque rallies? They always come off as posers, a little to enthused about something as uninteresting as computers. It's like they hired Pepsi's ad agency instead of Coke's: always a little off the mark.

It's like the few times Steve Jobs has attempted to pull our sentimental strings in his keynotes -- we just don't buy it. If people get annoyed by the "quirky" music in the switch ads (which apparently has taken on its own life after watching a bunch of similar ads on TV this weekend), this stuff must produce reactions like scraping fingernails on a chalkboard.

Anyway, have you noticed the Emerald City/Eden imagery of both the AOL and MSN campaigns? I hope people can soon be free of this model of ISP to a more transparent internet. I think a critical mass adopting broadband for home use could do this.

I just saw this commercial today. This MSN butterfly really is some sort of unholy amalgam of Arthur and The Tick. Ew. Regarding the advertising practices, what do expect from a company that wrote fake letters of support and sent them to all the media outlets during their trial? They are just another Enron or Worldcom. No ethics to speak of. It's actually starting to hurt them. I am happy to see people to realize this.

You're and idiot. Can't you do a better job of "slamming" me than that?</strong><hr></blockquote>

Rather than coming back with an coherent argument backed with data, your response was an ad hominem attack. Talk about a void of originality! And MS as M$? Please, that's is so trite.

So let look at again at what MS did in NYC: they used guerilla advertising in one city (I am against this form of advertising, BTW, by any company), the news got carried nation-wide, and they got a insignificant slap on the wrist. What's Microsoft not to like about all this?